


The Biography of Dipper Pines

by MaryPSue



Series: Return, Rewind, Rewrite [4]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Family, Gen, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:52:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5093156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History is written by the victors. Or, sometimes, by twelve-year-old girls with a penchant for glitter glue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Biography of Dipper Pines

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposting some old one-shots from the Transcendence AU blog on tumblr.

“Dad, what is this?”

Lionel Sterling lowered his newspaper to see his son, holding up a dusty, tattered book with a brown cover. The faded title ‘Dipper Pines: Portrait of an Adventurer’ was barely visible through the thick layer of dust and cobwebs on the cover. “I still have that? Where on earth did you find it?”

“Pops and Meemaw gave me that box of your old books from the house when they moved down to Florida.”

“And you finally got through enough of your own library to open it up?” Lionel flashed his son a teasing grin as he reached out a hand for the old book. Dipper rolled his eyes, but he handed the book over, taking a few steps forward to look over Lionel’s shoulder as Lionel flipped open the front cover.  _Happy eleventh birthday to my favourite adventurous soul! Love, Aunt Melinda_ , met his eyes, crabby handwriting faded with time, and Lionel realised he was smiling.

“Oh my gosh,” Dipper said quietly, as he reached down to turn the page and stared, wide-eyed, at the picture printed in the frontispiece. “They actually – they used my author photo?”

“Author photo?” Lionel looked down at the colour photo on its glossy paper, the image of a small boy (Lionel didn’t remember him looking so small, so young, had only remembered the determination in his gaze and the authority of his pose, and somehow, knowing what had befallen him was doubly horrifying now that Lionel could see just how young he’d been). Dipper wasn’t looking at the camera, facing away and upwards instead, as though his gaze was fixed on some unseen star. He’d imitated the pose of the subject of some old painting, one foot planted firmly on a pile of books like a conquering explorer surveying his domain, small chest puffed out and arms raised proudly. He looked solemn and earnest and completely ridiculous.

Lionel glanced up at Dipper, looking down at the photo with a grimace halfway between embarrassment and pride on his face. He could just imagine what had gone through the boy’s head, setting up the elaborate backdrop, choosing his pose, how much thought and care had probably gone into the photograph, and Lionel couldn’t help but smile.

“Wow, that’s…that’s really old,” Dipper said, colour rising to his cheeks as he quickly turned the page. 

“What did you mean, ‘author photo’?” Lionel asked, as Dipper flipped through the book, eyebrows rising towards his hairline with each photograph or chapter heading.

“Huh? Okay, don’t laugh, but I started writing a guide to the mysteries of Gravity Falls the summer we spent there. Mabel butted in, of course, and…I think I might’ve written some of it in my sleep? It ended up being kind of a mess, anyway.” He flipped over a page, and chuckled, his voice going soft and nostalgic as he said, “Oh my gosh, I forgot all about that!”

Lionel looked over Dipper’s shoulder, taking in the photograph of a smiling girl with braces who looked remarkably like his daughter and must be Dipper’s twin Mabel, one arm wrapped around Dipper and the other raised to hold a camera. Dipper had his arms crossed and was scowling into the camera, the word ‘GOOBER’ visible in black block letters across his forehead.

“ ‘Goober’?” Lionel asked, and Dipper’s face went red at an almost alarming speed. 

“Long story, not interesting. Hey, look, there’s a whole section here on the video Guides we made! Did you know I was the first person to ever catch a Hide-Behind on camera? Well, me and Mabel, I guess.”

“I did,” Lionel said, quietly, as Dipper flipped the page over and laughed out loud. It hadn’t really ever  _hit_  him before, that this was one of his childhood idols, right here, in the flesh, but suddenly it was all he could think about. This was the same Dipper who’d uncovered a secret society of memory-wipers, had battled dinosaurs and giant vampire bats, had foiled the demon Cipher’s plans to destroy the world, and Lionel hadn’t ever asked him -

“Oh, man, and the goat!” Dipper gave another fond laugh, flipping faster through the book. His eyebrows drew together at a page that sported a large picture of Wendy Corduroy, posed with an axe in one hand and a sword in the other, a scowl on her face. “What?” He scanned the text under the picture and broke into giggles. “Oh man, seriously? Whoever wrote this obviously never did voiceovers for security tapes with her. Who even thinks that Wendy was all serious all the time?”

It took Lionel a moment to find his voice. “Most scholars agree -”

“Yeah, well, most scholars are wrong.” Dipper sat down next to Lionel, leaning against his arm, and Lionel put an arm around Dipper and pulled him close against his side without thinking. “Wendy’s the one who taught Mabel how to cross one eye and not the other, and we used to have vacuum cleaner races when Stan wasn’t around. All her idea. Stan always had a million vacuum cleaners lying around for some reason, even though I don’t remember there actually being any carpet anywhere in the Mystery Shack?” Dipper shrugged, his smile fading slightly as he turned to the next page. “Wow, I hadn’t thought about Wendy or Stan in ages. And Soos! Man, I miss that guy.” He gave a soft sigh and shifted closer to Lionel. “Heck, I even miss  _Robbie_.”

“Robbie?” Lionel asked, wracking his brains. He didn’t think any of the books he’d read had ever mentioned a ‘Robbie’ –

“Robbie Valentino? He was kind of my nemesis for the first half of the summer, then Mabel hooked him up with Tambry and I guess we were friends after that.” Dipper glanced up at Lionel, a disbelieving smile on his face. “Wait, people seriously remember the  _goat_  and they forgot about Robbie? I’d say that’s ironic, but I don’t think that’s quite the right word.”

Sometimes, when he was working with the library’s collection of old books, Lionel would come across a note scribbled in the margins, or something slipped between the pages, a shopping list yellowed and faded with age, a dried and flattened flower, its bright colours dulled but preserved, receipts or love notes or, on one memorable occasion, a desiccated slice of salami. No matter how many times it happened, it always took Lionel by surprise. The thrill of discovery mingled with a staggering sense of time, of just how vast it was, how uncaring. 

Everything left in a book was the trace of a person, someone whole and living, someone whose entire rich, contradictory existence had ultimately come to nothing more than a few chicken-scratch lines correcting a misinformed author or a dried-out, misplaced slice of luncheon meat. Lionel couldn’t help but wonder, when he stumbled across these traces, who the person had been who’d left them there, what sort of a life they’d had. Who else had been close to them, had meant the world to them, and hadn’t even left so much as their meagre trace.

Dipper glanced up at him again, this time with a hint of worry in his big brown eyes, and Lionel couldn’t think of anything but how many lives, how many  _people_ , those eyes must have seen pass by. How many half-forgotten names boiled down to dry snippets of post-Transcendence history had living, breathing people behind them, who only existed now in Dipper’s memory.

How many whose names had been lost completely, vanishing without so much as a scribbled note in the margins.

“…oh,” Lionel said. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

“Dad, are you okay?” Dipper asked, voice heavy with concern, and Lionel forced a smile, realising his eyes had grown strangely hot and tight.

“Fine,” he managed, the word sticking slightly in his throat. He leaned over, pulling Dipper into a tight hug and pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “Are you?”

Lionel felt Dipper go tense, then relax back into the hug, one hand coming up to grab onto Lionel’s arm like a life preserver. “I guess so,” he said, after a long moment, so softly that Lionel wasn’t sure at first that he’d really heard the words. “I haven’t thought about them in - in a while.” 

His voice dropped again, as he reached down to the book, flipping the page to reveal a photograph of five people, a large man in a question mark t-shirt and an older gentleman in a suit and a fez, Wendy Corduroy looking younger than Lionel could ever remember seeing her, the girl he now recognised as Mabel, and the small figure of Dipper himself. “I can’t believe I let myself forget.”

Lionel gave Dipper a squeeze, pulling his son onto his lap and not mentioning the sniffles that quickly turned to choked-back sobs as he held Dipper close. He tried not to think about how, one day, he himself would be nothing more than a trace left on his son’s memory.

It might not, he decided, be such a bad way to be immortalized.

At last, the sobs turned into sniffles again, and the sniffles died away. Lionel leaned over to give Dipper another kiss on the top of the head. “How’re you feeling?”

Dipper pushed away from Lionel, flashing a brief, wan smile despite the way his eyes were shining. “A little better. Sorry, I just - it just hit me all at once.” He rubbed one eye with the back of his hand, giving a thick laugh. “It’s so weird, that they can just be  _gone_ like that. I mean, I can still see Mabel trying to put a pound of gummy worms up her nose.”

Lionel let out a surprised laugh before he could stop himself. Thankfully, Dipper laughed too, the choked quality slowly fading from his voice. “Didn’t I tell you about that?”

“You didn’t,” Lionel said. “I’m sorry I never really asked about…Mabel, but I didn’t want to bring up painful memories -”

“Seriously?” Dipper shook his head, but his smile looked genuine. “Okay, you go find Belle, I’m getting the Journal. You guys both  _need_  to see Mabel’s scrapbook.”


End file.
